The Mexican government is taking steps to ban what they call “propaganda” put out by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, Kristi Noem.
The ads are part of a Trump administration campaign aimed at discouraging illegal migration and urging undocumented immigrants to self-deport. The multi-million-dollar effort, paid for by U.S. tax dollars, was announced by Noem shortly after she took office, The Washington Post noted.
The campaign is set to cost $200 million over the next two years, even as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is cutting federal funding and jobs.
It has been slammed by Mexican politicians across the aisle, as well as the president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has gotten off to a good start in her relationship with President Donald Trump, who has eased the burden of tariffs against the country.
Mexico’s Congress is now set to push forward legislation that would ban the broadcasting of the ads on TV and radio channels.
“Mexico stands for diversity, inclusion, and rights,” Sheinbaum told the press earlier this week. “Our sovereignty must be respected.”
The ads have so far been shown in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and the U.S.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Post that the plan is for the ads to be broadcast in Mandarin, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, and Portuguese. They’re set to be shown on both broadcast and digital platforms, including Univision and Telemundo.
“The data shows the world is hearing our message. Border crossings have reached the lowest ever recorded,” she told the paper in a statement. “Migrants are turning back before they even reach our borders.”
In 2023, arrests at the border reached a record high before significantly decreasing during 2024, with analysts pointing to harsher U.S. asylum restrictions and increased enforcement in Mexico and Panama.
DHS has launched ad campaigns before, such as in 2022 when the Biden administration paid for digital ads targeting migrants from Guatemala and Honduras, with the ads focusing on smugglers tricking and abusing migrants.
The commercials the administration is currently pushing out resemble political ads, featuring Trump speeches, the president signing orders, and saluting military officers.
Noem states in one of the ads that previous U.S. leadership has been “weak” and that it led to a flood of “drugs, human trafficking, and violent criminals.”
Obama's top ICE official, Kate Mills, told the paper that “It is more political messaging than we’ve seen in the past, to have a secretary there, and giving so much credit to the president.”
However, both analysts and former officials say the ads are mostly ineffective, as migrants’ decisions are based on their chances of escaping poverty and violence.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Noem said Trump had told her how to do the campaign.
“He said: ‘I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads,’” said the secretary.
“I want you to thank me for closing the border,” in the first ad, Trump allegedly told Noem.
The ads started being shown in Mexico on YouTube some weeks ago, but grabbed significant attention last weekend when one of the commercials was broadcast during a soccer game on the network Televisa.
“If you come here and you break our laws, we will hunt you down,” Noem said in the ad, which was in English with Spanish subtitles.
Some opposition politicians slammed the ads and Sheinbaum’s response, with Rubén Moreira, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, asking, “Where is the diplomatic note? Where is the response via international law? Why didn’t we recall the Mexican ambassador to Washington?”
Sheinbaum told the press that the commercials were “discriminatory” and that a new law would ban foreign “propaganda.”
Her party has a large majority in Congress and is set to quickly pass the legislation.
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